Warm Bodies review: Like Romeo and Juliet, but with the undead

Zombie movies are, ironically, seldom known for the strength of their zombie performances. There are exceptions, of course, most of them named William. The famously voluble Billy Connolly moaned his way through Fido; Bill Nighy was a good brain-eater in Shaun of the Dead; and Bill Murray did great work in Zombieland, although he wasn’t technically a zombie — or was he?

To that list may now be added Nicholas Hoult (the boy in About a Boy) and Rob (ahem) William Corddry. In this clever zombie love story — it’s basically Romeo and Juliet and Zombies, complete with a balcony scene — Hoult and Corddry play R and M, upstanding if somewhat undead citizens of a world where a zombie plague has wiped out most of humanity.

As we learn in a bit of opening voice-over, the undead don’t do much. R spends his days wandering around an airport concourse, not unlike what a lot of us do in life. Oh, and he also attacks and eats the living when he can. But as he points out, he’s not one of those skeletal “bonies.” He still feels conflicted about what he does, and he’s willing to change.

He gets his chance when he kills and consumes Perry (Dave Franco), the not-very-good, not-very-worthy sort-of boyfriend of a conflicted zombie-hunter named Julie (Teresa Palmer). See how we’re set up to be sympathetic to R, even as he’s munching on Perry’s flocculonodular lobe? I never cared much for Tybalt, either, to be honest.

Eating Perry’s brains (and some credit must go to Julie’s inherent hotness) causes emotion, feeling and intellect to stir beneath R’s pallid exterior. Since he’s somehow managed to drag Julie back to his home in an abandoned airliner, he has a chance to convince her that he means her no harm. He even helps her escape his fellow zombies, advising her to play (un)dead.

Writer/director Jonathan Levine isn’t above throwing some non-zom clichés into the mix. Julie probably feels the warmest reciprocal glow when she finds R’s collection of music — on vinyl, which is movie shorthand for “heartfelt and cool.” Struggling to explain its appeal, R manages to form the words: “better … sound.” The soundtrack obliges with such ’80s old-school numbers as Missing You, Rock You Like a Hurricane and Hungry Heart.

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But for every pair of star-cross’d lovers there’s a grouchy Capulet, perfectly portrayed in this performance by John Malkovich as Julie’s dad. Seems he single-handedly saved the remnants of the human race by organizing a walled fortress, and he’s a firm believer that the only good zombie is a dead one — actually a twice-dead one if you get my meaning.

Malkovich lends a certain authority to the proceedings — he was Malkovich in Being John Malkovich, remember, and who else could have pulled that one off? But this is Hoult’s show, and he steals it admirably, slowly evolving from a shambolic, monosyllabic shuffler to a reliable love interest with enough physical dexterity to kiss the girl. He may never quite reach the heights of iambic pentameter, but consider where he started.

Corddry, too, performs a commendable de-zombification routine, while Analeigh Tipton (Crazy, Stupid, Love) has a nice supporting role as Julie’s best friend. Just don’t worry about Warm Bodies following Shakespeare down the road to tragedy. After all, the original R and Julie could only die once.